How do Barbarian Shamans and their toys hold up in Velious?

[Orruar]

Originally Posted by Reikerz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You're missing the entire point of what I said. Sure you can run a parser and know when the next bash is coming. But what if you need need to cast a torpor or turgur's close to the next bash? Simply knowing the bash is coming doesn't help you at all. You can avoid casting an important spell but that doesn't help you, that just means that bash shut you down from casting an important spell that you needed to refresh. If you're an ogre, you can just ignore the bash and cast the important spells when you actually need to. Like I mentioned before, this could be the difference between winning and losing high-difficulty solo fights.

Since you seem to be struggling, I'll give you some tips.

1) You don't need a parser... Just have all mob hits on you go to one window and watch it for bashes. When mob is unslowed, you have 8 seconds. When mob is slowed, you have 32 seconds. I'm not real familiar with the WW dragons, but I assume most are slowable if shamans are soloing them. This makes the bash problem rather trivial.

2) You know when you'll need to land torpor. Assuming you want to keep it rolling 24x7, you have a 6 second window in which to cast and get the full benefit of every torpor. Knowing when in that 6 second window you need to cast depends on the bash timer.

3) Even ogres can run into problems with slow resists. That's why you begin recasting slow well before you need it to land. It's easier to do than torpor, since it's only 3 seconds of cast time. And if you're casting this spell, it means the mob is slowable, which means a 32 second bash window. If you can't figure out how to land a slow between bashes at this point, you might want to go back to Farmville.

[Orruar]

Originally Posted by Reikerz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

All your problems lie in this paragraph. You assume that if a mob can be slowed, it will always be slowed on every attempt. The high skill solo targets in Velious have very high MR and your slow will most likely be resisted more than it lands. I'm not talking about soloing East Wastes orcs here. You're just making stuff up from a vacuum of unlikely perfect conditions, whereas I'm trying to offer advice based on years of experience.

Saying that Turgur's is easier to land than Torpor because it's a 3 second cast time is ridiculous. The stumbling block is not the 3 second cast time, it's the following 6 second recast time when the slow fails to land. It takes skill and experience on a mob-per-mob basis to know when to safely begin refreshing slow, and even then you can run into a particularly unlucky run of resists and have your slow come down to the wire on the end of the duration. Playing a shaman is all about the constant weaving of spells in the most efficient manner possible, you can "plan" around a 32 second bash timer, but that's not a fix, your options and therefore efficiency are still going to be limited as compared to the freedom that an ogre would have. When you're casting spells 100% of the time, there's no such thing as just taking a break for a bash or being okay with a spell interrupt.

Not going to keep going back and forth with someone who thinks they know what they're talking about when they don't.The fact still remains that the following is true:

In the most dangerous situations, in the situations that matter the most, stun immunity will give you the flexibility to survive when you may otherwise not. Regeneration, AC bonuses, or clicky snare necklace do not come close to compensating for the ogre bonus. You can do fine as other races, but if we're talking about which is best the answer is easily ogre.

Dude, stop already, I'm going to die laughing. How someone can be so ignorant and continue posting? How are you able to use a keyboard? Do you have some interface that allows you to press colors and shapes to convey ideas?

Turgur's IS easier to land in the sense that is it easier to cast without being interrupted. Clearly I wasn't saying it was easier to get it to hold on the mob than torpor being that torpor is a buff and so the comparison is meaningless. And in the paragraph you quoted, I stated that you have to begin casting slow well before it wears off to handle resists, so I very clearly made my position on the difficulty of reslowing these mobs known. How you can imply that I meant exactly the opposite of what I so clearly wrote is beyond my understanding.

And I don't know why you keep saying I haven't played a shaman... At first I assumed you were trying to set up some sort of joke, but I'm starting to think you really don't know that I do in fact play a shaman. I'm the only shaman on server that I know of that will solo in HS south (break and hold camp without use of puppet strings). So you're basically talking to the one person who knows the most about hardcore shaman soloing on this server.

I do wonder if you play a shaman though. If you did, you would know that planning around a 32 second bash timer is quite trivial. 90% of our casts are canni 3, and so all you really need to think about is when you'll cast torpor, slow, and any dots.